


and in that warm, bright light

by Anchoret



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, Thor (Movies), Thor - All Media Types
Genre: Fix-It, Gen, Kid Loki (Marvel), M/M, Master of Death, Master of Death Harry Potter, Master of Death Harry fixes everything, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Resurrection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-27
Updated: 2018-04-27
Packaged: 2019-04-28 15:09:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14451897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anchoret/pseuds/Anchoret
Summary: “Again?” Spoken in a suspiciously familiar British accent is the first thing Loki hears upon waking up.





	and in that warm, bright light

“Again?” Spoken in a suspiciously familiar British accent is the first thing Loki hears upon waking up.

Memories rush back to him like a tidal wave; for a moment he is submerged in the onslaught, unable to breathe. Thanos, the Space Stone, Thor’s skull caving under the Infinity Gauntlet – the Mad Titan’s hand around _his throat_ as he slowly runs out of air – 

“Hey, hey, easy there. Loki.”

“I’m dead,” he croaks, looking down at his hands, which are a deep cobalt blue. He closes his eyes and concentrates; when he opens them again, they’re flesh-colored once more. Not that it matters to him anymore, but Thor has – had – has - always known him in this skin. So this skin he will keep.

“Yup – only for the third time.”

Loki looks up. A white dome stretches endlessly around him; it has the shape of Asgard’s throne room, the great reaching spires and colonnades, the endless expanse of smooth floor beneath his feet, but everything consists of a pale, wispy substance that resembles mist but is strangely solid. The memories are coming back to him, another set of memories which he only retains while he is here, with - 

“Harry.”

“That’s me.” Vibrant green eyes smile back at him, clear and ageless. The Master of Death sits cross-legged in front of him, looking not a day older than the last time Loki saw him – which is to say, not a day older than seventeen.

“Is Thor - ”

“Thor is all right. Thanos spared him after your assassination attempt.”

Harry smiles at him sadly, sympathetically, as Loki slowly lowers his head into his lap, taking a moment to just breathe. 

He did it. Thor is fine. Thor lives on. Thor will know what to do; Loki has told him as much as he could, without giving things away, and the rest Thor will figure out somehow. Thor will be fine.

“I was there,” Harry continues in a soft voice. Loki wishes he would stop talking like that, as if to a frightened animal; but for some unfathomable reason Loki can never truly be angry at Harry James Potter. It has nothing to do with gratitude, and everything to do with all that Harry is. “It was a brave thing that you did. Thor stayed with you until the ship exploded. He was - ”

“That’s fine. I have no need of knowing what the great oaf did after I was dead.” Loki clenches his hands; he can imagine it, all too easily, though he is trying his best not to: Thor, bloodied and battered, clawing out of his makeshift cage, crawling to Loki’s side. He probably did something awfully sentimental, too, like staying with Loki’s dead, unfeeling body even as the ship disintegrated all around him. Calling his name, maybe.

Pinpoints of pain in his palms make him look down. Thin rivulets of blood are seeping from where his nails dug into skin; Loki relaxes his hands slowly, purposefully, staring at the red tinge beneath his nails.

“Has Thanos succeeded?”

Harry doesn’t answer right away. When Loki looks to him, the boy wears a contemplative expression. “Right now, the universe – _your_ universe - hangs in an uncertain state; it is between time, between space, between possibilities.”

“You mean he succeeded. He did enact his plan. He did gather all six stones, and - ”

“So he did,” Harry agrees, and Loki has to close his eyes for a second against the all-consuming despair. All that he tried, all that he has given up – “But all is not lost yet. Your mortal wizard saw the solution.”

Loki scowls. “He is not _my_ wizard. Just because I talked to him a few times - ”

“And taught him how to create clones of himself? And told him all about Thanos, even after he left you in a time rift for thirty minutes?” The Master of Death grins at him, impishly. “Stephen Strange is a talented man. And tenacious.”

“For a mortal,” Loki mutters. He stands up, and it is a miracle to feel solid ground beneath his feet again, after those horrifying seconds as he dangled futilely in Thanos’s grip. Loki breathes in, carefully, willing his shaking hands to still. He tries to think of something else, anything else.

“Surely, I have not come here for a resurrection, _yet again_ ,” he murmurs. “That would be much too fortunate for me.”

Harry cocks his head. “Why not?”

Loki does not gape at him, but it is a near thing. “You know that reason as well as I. Before, I was – needed. The universe required a warning for Thanos, so I was - sent, as it were - as that warning. And after Svartálfar, someone had to be there, to manage the Stones and protect Asgard when none knew better, with the All-Father so maddened and his heir disheartened. Now, every being in the known universe has learned the threat of Thanos. There is nothing more to be done about the Stones, for the Titan has already gathered all of them. There is nothing more that I can do.”

Is there?

Loki isn’t even sure if he wants to go back, if he can. These last few years he has known nothing but madness, betrayal, and pain. It has taken him so long to earn back Thor’s trust again, and now he finally has it. There had been no doubt in Thor’s eyes as Loki walked up to the Mad One and prepared his final strike, only a mutely screaming panic and grief. 

If he goes back…what will he even do? What will he be?

He is no villain now, no monster. But he is also no hero.

There is no place for Loki Odinson, son of Asgard and of Jotunheim, in Stephen Strange’s carefully devised timeline. 

He is dead. It is over now.

As if sensing what Loki is thinking, Harry unfolds from the ground gracefully, walking in light, airy steps, until they stand face to face. The Master of Death is tall – if he had taken on the form of an older self, he would probably be even taller – but as it is, the shape of a mortal teenager is no compare to that of a grown god. For all that, Loki feels small in front of him. It is revolting, insulting, and strangely comforting, all at the same time. Loki is reminded anew of the power this seeming child holds: the power to rewrite life and death itself, the inimitable force that defies the one constant in the universe, again and again. Green, timeless eyes glitter behind round glasses. 

Harry is the wisdom that Thanos will never gain.

“Loki Odinson – Laufeyson - Friggasson,” Loki’s heart skips a beat at the last moniker, “Prince of two realms, King of two realms. Loki Twice-Fallen. Loki Twice-Stolen.” Harry studies him, reaches out a hand to gently trace the invisible markings Loki knows are winding their way down his forehead and cheeks, down to his neck, where traces of Thanos’s handprints have faded in death. “You have come here, time and again, because you and I share a particular peculiarity; a particular destiny.”

Loki barks out a humorless laugh. “Escaping death?” 

Harry smiles. “I’ve told you my story before. What good o’ Tom wanted, I was inadvertently given. All his attempts to flee death resulted in my immortality instead. I fled, from the hands of a mad man, from the jaws of a Basilisk and the claws of a dragon, from hundreds of Death Eaters and Dementors. I lived, even as people in my life I’d have preferred to live died.”

Loki’s heart tugs painfully. Is this what Thor is experiencing right now? His home world, destroyed; his people, his belonging, obliterated. His family all gone from him. Has Loki deprived Thor of the last thing he ever thought of as home?

When Loki first boarded the Statesman, he wasn’t sure that Thor even wanted him back. He was shaken, still trying to find his footing among the large host of people Thor managed to gather around himself with his unquenchable charisma and charm. But for months, as he and Thor hurtled through space with the remains of their inheritance, it was Loki’s chambers Thor always retired to when he could no longer smile and pat shoulders and reassure, it was Loki’s healing spells he sought when the long hours of desk work wove knots into his wide, battle-honed shoulders. It was Loki that Thor looked to when council members along with Asgardian and Sakaaran refugees crowded him for answers, for solutions. It was to Loki whom he always gave that muted, honest smile.

Loki had walked up to Thanos, and in doing so, took the last thing that ever mattered to Thor from him. He had abandoned Thor, again. He balls his hands into fists. He had no choice. He had no choice.

Harry’s eyes are far too knowing for his liking. “Of course, you don’t have to go back. No one can force you to do anything now. Not here.” Loki shudders again.

The freedom to choose. What he has always desired, and never quite possessed. The shapes are coalescing, consolidating all around him; miraculously, the throne room is still empty. He breathes out, carefully. One. Two.

“What other choices do I have?”

Harry hums. He wanders towards a certain direction, and Loki follows. “There are quite a few. You can go back to a specific point in time - ”

“No, thank you,” Loki says curtly. He has no wish to rewind back to a time when Thor looked at him only with mistrust and anguish, and he has even less wish to go back to a time when Thor did not see him at all. He will not change all the choices he has made, will not undo all his mistakes, for he has tried doubly as hard to rectify them. He will not erase all of that in one cowardly stroke.

Harry’s smile widens, as if he already knew that answer. “You can go on.”

Loki stops. Harry stops too, and turns back to him, shadowy cloak billowing out behind him as a storm cloud.

On. What he has always looked for, on one level or another, ever since that day a Jotun grabbed his arm and broke him beyond repair. He might see Frigga again – unless – 

“Where would ‘on’ be, for me?” Loki swallows past the hard lump that has suddenly formed in his throat. “I doubt I’ve earned a place in the halls of Valhalla.” And if he hasn't, then he and Thor will truly be separated till Ragnarok come.

“Well,” Harry grins, all mischief, of a kind that Loki has long since lost in the years he spent suffocated by jealousy and rage, “I could send you there no matter what, but you _will_ need to deal with Odin.”

Loki grimaces. “Maybe. I’ll think about it.”

Harry laughs, and it lights up his face in such a manner that for a moment he seems just as any other youth. Bright-eyed and unafraid. Loki stares at him in wonder.

“What did you choose, when you had the same choice?” Loki whispers.

“I have told you twice before,” Harry says, and even as he says it, Loki is starting to remember. “I chose to go back, because my mission wasn’t finished, and there were people who were waiting, who would have mourned. You chose the same – twice. But it is different now, is it not?”

It is. His destiny is finished.

A vaguely familiar feeling is welling up within him: he wants to remember this boy, remember his smile, remember this place, the peace that he has only known here. If only he can stay here…

Harry shakes his head, gentle and apologetic. “It is my job to send people on, not keep them here. You won’t be the same if you stay.”

“I can be like you.”

Harry’s smile grows. “I’m afraid that post is already taken.”

Loki exhales dramatically. ”Oh, well. It was too much to hope for, anyway. I guess I’ll have to be the god of something else.”

Harry flops back onto the stairs to the throne dais that has somehow materialized behind them, and gestures for Loki to do the same. “Not such a fan of mischief anymore?”

Loki scrunches his nose. “It was Thor’s fault that I was stuck with that for so long, you know. Half of the schemes we cooked up were his ideas, but he went and blamed it all on me.”

“Yes, I do know,” Harry says with laughter in his voice. 

Loki breathes out again and stares up at the nebulous, shifting murals on the high, pale dome. For a second he thinks he saw a likeness of Frigga, smiling, golden-robed; then he thinks he saw a flash of Thor’s eyes, clear blue as the sky after a storm. There are other swathes of deep blue – Jotuns; bearded, stooped figures – dwarves. The Nine Realms play out in pale, insubstantial colors on the ceiling. Behind them, Hliðskjálf stands empty.

“This is where all the most transformative changes of your life occurred,” Harry murmurs. “It is your King’s Cross.”

“King’s Cross?”

Harry doesn’t answer. He cocks his head to the side again, as if listening to some silent message; then he turns back to Loki. There is a distance to his eyes now. On some instinctive level, Loki already knows what it signals. He thinks of Thor, out in the universe, of the smile he will never give another, now. “There is another choice. You can go back – as a child. No memories. No past. No crimes.”

“A new beginning,” Loki mouths the words as if they’ve been placed on his tongue. 

“Yes. You’ll still be yourself – Jotun _and_ Aesir - ” Loki expects to feel anger and disappointment for a second, but there is nothing, only a calm steadiness. “You’ll be born somewhere else, most likely on Earth. You won’t have any family; your ties with the All-Father’s house is too strong, your thread too tangled with Thor’s for you to ever bond with anyone else in those same ways.”

“Of course.” He expects no less. For fifteen hundred years, he has defined himself based on and against Thor; and Thor has done the same with him. They were each other’s corner stones. The marks they have left on each other’s souls are too deeply etched to ever be written over. And, surprisingly, he realizes that for perhaps the first time in a long while, he doesn’t wish them to be. 

Harry glances at him from where he has been staring off into space, warm and sad. “It won’t be easy, growing up without anyone.”

“It is how I am fated to be.” Just as Odin said.

Harry inclines his head in acquiescence. He takes out a small, sharp, three-sided stone from his pocket, and it spins above his palm. They do not talk as they sit in the now solid throne room, waiting for the sun to rise.

Faintly, there came a whirring in the distance, a trembling in the ground, growing in strength until it reaches where they sit, like the vibrations of the Bifrost before it opens a path to another planet. Loki stands up from the dais, brushing off his clothes. They’re not Sakaaran leather anymore, he notices, but the first set of green-and-silver armored outfit he was given when he came of age. 

Harry stands as well, suddenly much taller than him, and Loki realizes that it is not Harry who has grown tall, but he who has grown short. He looks down at his hands: soft, with much sparser battle callouses than he is used to. A child’s hands. He raises his head, and when he speaks, his voice is high and thin, unchanged.  


“I suppose this is farewell, then.” He looks away, towards the horizon, where the first, fiery rays of dawn are seeping through the white plain; a golden light spill all over the thin rings of climbing cloud in the bright sky and the palace; the bell chimes, once, twice, thrice. The world awaits. “I think Thor and I will find each other again.” 

He takes a step down from the dais.

_The sun will shine on us again._

“Yes,” Harry says, and takes his hand.

**Author's Note:**

> IW wrecked me so I stayed up all night writing this. I hope this has given you some comfort and closure, too.


End file.
